Swinburne University of Technology has officially launched its $4 million supercomputer OzStar and given it a paint job in ode to Albert Einstein. The supercomputer, which can deliver more than a petaflop of processing power, is being used by the Swinburne-based Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav) to search for gravitational waves and study the extreme physics of black holes and warped space-time. OzStar, based at Swinburne’s Hawthorn campus, is one of the most powerful computers in Australia, and the 444th most powerful in the world. Professor Matthew Bailes, director of OzGrav said the supercomputer is processing gravitational wave data collected by advanced LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory) installations in the US and powerful enough to search for coalescing black holes and neutron stars in real time. “In one second, OzStar can perform 10,000 calculations for every one of the 100 billion starts in our galaxy,” Bailes said. OzStar is powered by Dell EMC PowerEdge R740 servers equipped with Xeon processors and NVIDIA Telsa P100 GPUs. The supercomputer has 4140 CPU cores spread between 107 standard compute nodes and eight ‘data crunching’ nodes and 350 GPUs. A 100 gigabit Dell EMC H-Series Networking Fabric delivers aggregate bandwidth of 86.4 terabits per second, and OzStar has access to five pebibytes of storage. Beside gravitational wave studies, the system will also be used to support research in molecular dynamics, nanophotonics, advanced chemistry and atomic optics. It will also enable Swinburne’s Data Science Research Institute to tackle future data science challenges such… [Read full story]